Follow the author of this article

Follow the topics within this article

The prospect of national treasure Penelope Keith treading the boards at Chichester is enough to cause a rustling of excitement in this neck of the woods. The adoration is mutual. Keith – a dame since 2014 – has starred here many times. And her attachment is personal as much as it is professional.

Love bloomed the first year she acted at the Festival Theatre, in 1977, in Shaw’s The Apple Cart. A royal Jubilee gala was held entailing – this being during the dark days of the IRA – a heavy police presence. “I came down the steps from my dressing-room,” Keith fondly recalled some years ago, “bumped into this policeman and thought “Oh, he looks dishy”, then went on stage. I had just met my future husband [Rodney Timpson]. We got married the next year.”

Keith, 78, is the hardy perennial of stage comedy – you can plant her in anything that calls for a woman of a certain breeding and indomitable bearing, and she’ll thrive. In her time, she has played Lady Bracknell in The Importance of Being Earnest and Lady Wishfort in The Way of the World.

But dwarfing everything on her packed CV are those snootish-yet-lovable sitcom roles that had millions at home glued with great grins on their faces: Margo Leadbetter in The Good Life and Audrey fforbes-Hamilton in To the Manor Born. Irony of ironies, Keith – a noted horticulturalist (she has described herself as “a gardener who acts”) – has now taken the role of someone who possesses the opposite of green fingers.

A case of “Come into the garden, Margo”? Yes there are shades of The Good Life’s snobby suburbanite in Keith’s realisation of Mrs St Maugham, a widow living by the sea in Sussex in Enid Bagnold’s The Chalk Garden. Yet the evening – directed by Alan Strachan – only gains from those affectionate associations.

In her metaphor-laden drama of Freudian dysfunction and ever so fey healing (first seen in New York in 1955) Bagnold created a caustic, imperious matriarch who is to her domestic life what she is to the great outdoors: a casualty of ingrained temperament and poor soil. Nothing flourishes outside, cursed by the lime and chalk terrain, and emotional “blight” has afflicted two generations: her daughter is estranged, her grand-daughter, “violated” at the age of 12, has turned acidly pert and problematically pyromaniac.

Into this gently comic-toxic scenario (we’re in a garden-room, well-furnished to the point of bohemian chaos in Simon Higlett’s sprawling, rug-strewn design) steps a redemptive female help – the mysterious Miss Madrigal, selected from a number of eccentrics vying for the Poppins-y post. Amanda Root plays her, and does so well – still, calm, self-possessed – but not as well, alas, as Penelope Wilton did 10 years ago in Michael Grandage’s fittingly intimate production at the Donmar, in which the actress combined top-soil reserve with buried hurt, coaxing tenderness, by degrees, from Margaret Tyzack’s fearsome Mrs St M.

And that’s the problem with this revival as a whole – it’s not finessed enough, or rather too readily assumes the play has achieved the status of a modern classic. Kenneth Tynan enthused at its London premiere that it was “the finest artificial comedy to have flowed from an English pen since the death of Congreve”. Be that as it may (and he rashly omitted Coward), too many of the cast appear defeated by the artifice: Emma Curtis fails to make herself plausibly at home in the role of the headstrong grand-daughter, and even Oliver Ford Davies, playing a visiting judge who rumbles Madrigal’s incriminating past, has the air of a man permanently on shaky ground.

What you’re left with is the chance to see Keith – eyes secateur-sharp, deploying her treasurable armoury of uncomprehending stares and frowns of disapproval, handing out waspish bons mots like home-made cakes at a village fete. Age has not withered her talent to wither away, splendidly.

But her comic edict doesn’t extend sufficiently far enough into the thickets at Chichester. And after a lacklustre start to the season with a strenuously reconceived version of Present Laughter, the question has to be asked whether the theatre’s recent £22m renovation is paying the necessary artistic dividends. Daniel Evans’s competent programming needs now to incline towards the more grandly risk-taking, but an even greater nettle may need to be grasped in future in terms of scaling-down the too-cavernous auditorium.

This theatre simply can’t rely overly on loyal star-players and forgiving regulars. Things should hopefully pick up with Me and My Girl but, truth be told, this current offering isn’t much cop.